Is Teavivre's Dragon Pearl Black Tea Worth the Money?

By: Aileen - June 6, 2017

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Buying tea online from a source you’ve never gotten tea before is always a risk for many tea drinkers. Here at CompareTea, we think of it as an adventure. While we may have our favorite tea sources, we try to broaden our horizons and step out into the unknown.

Our search led us to Teavivre, one of the most popular tea brands among tea lovers and in a lot of online tea communities. Because they offer a huge selection of teas, we decided to get their Featured Sampler Gift pack.

Steeping Time & Temperature: Three to five minutes at 203-degree Fahrenheit or 95-degree Celsius

Steeping Instructions: The sampler pack doesn’t come with other brewing instructions except for the time and temperature. Their website, however, says to use three dragon pearls for a 12-oz (355 ml) cup if you’re using the western method to brew. If you’d like to do it the Chinese gongfu way, use three to four dragon pearls and steep five times for 20, 10, 10, 20, and 60 seconds. Don’t forget to rinse before the first steeping.

Price: Between $2 and $77.90 depending on package size

Dry Fengqing Dragon Pearl Black Tea

Teavivre’s Fenging dragon pearls are shaped by hand. Each piece has a diameter of about 8 to 12 millimeters. The dragon pearls were beautifully rolled and are almost even in size. The sampler pack we got contains 10 pearls.

Close your eyes and imagine you’re in a grassfield; a cocoa plant isn’t too far away. That’s the aroma of these pearls –earthy with a whiff of cocoa.

We used the Western method for steeping and tried steeping using three pearls and seven pearls. We did each for a full five minutes for an 8-oz cup (237 ml).

Steeped Fengqing Dragon Pearl Black Tea

My dad (yes, sometimes our tea reviews turn into a family thing. Haha!) liked how smooth it is. My mom loved that despite being a black tea, it gives you a mild flavor. Both tried a couple of cups steeped with three pearls and seven pearls. They preferred the one steeped with seven pearls.

As I like my black tea with richer flavor, I already knew steeping with three pearls wouldn’t give me the taste that I was looking for. I still had to try, though. 5 pearls did work its magic on me. Given that these dragon pearls offer a milder flavor than other black tea varieties, the taste I got with 5 pearls met my expectations for this tea.

A second steeping gave a very weak flavor that we’d recommend using the pearls only once.

Overall Fengqing Dragon Pearl Black Tea Experience

My folks had a great time with this tea! If we had more, I think this is the one they’d take out of the cupboard more often.

The top three things we loved about this tea –and probably the reasons we’d buy this tea online again –are:

Its rich color

Its smoothness

Its aroma

Is it worth your money? Yes. We find the prices for this tea reasonable. Teavivre offers it in zip pouches and tin cans.

A sampler set containing two packs with each pack weighing 7 grams each is just $2. A 100-gram pack costs $12.90. If you’re a big tea drinker and you need more, you can buy a 500-gram bag for only $57.90 ora 500-gram tin can for just $77.90.

Is it for you? Fengqing Dragon Pearl Black tea’s smooth, mellow flavor is perfect if you want to get into black tea but aren’t ready for the full-bodied ones yet. It’s also the right tea for those who prefer a milder black tea that doesn’t have pronounced peaks.

If you’re looking for or are used to stronger types of black tea, consider looking for Teavivre’s other black tea varieties before you decide to buy tea online.

You can find out more about Teavivre’s Fenging Dragon Pearl Black tea here.

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